Kelela announces ‘Hallucinogen’ EP, shares Arca-produced A Message

03.03.15

Kelela is releasing a new EP, 'Hallucinogen', on May 5th. Before that, she's streaming a new song, A Message, produced by Arca.

Written over the course of two years, the six songs that comprise the 'Hallucinogen' EP cover the different stages of a relationship: tumultuous times to domestic bliss. It acts as a bridge between Kelela's debut mixtape, 'Cut 4 Me', and her debut album, due in Autumn.

In a press release, the R&B singer explains how she met Arca on a boat in August 2012. "We sought one another out across a dance floor and within five minutes agreed to meet each other as soon as possible to collaborate," she says, "I had one song released to my name and had just heard one of his mixes, but we knew we’d found something in one another. We spent the next three days, 14 hours a day talking about our artistic visions and how it intersected with our personal lives, making songs that reflected that while dancing around the room to let it all out. About five or six demos were born out of these three days."

"A Message is one of the demos that came from those sessions and it speaks to the despair that I was experiencing at the time," she continues, "The initial version of the song spilled out of us in about 25 minutes. Since then, it’s been like a sculpture that I’ve come to and refined over time, adding a lyric here, refining a melody there, adding a bridge, etc. It’s a process that is now finally complete with its release and I'm so happy that I finally get to share it with all of you."